You can side with Hamas and still have no clue what Hamas wants. Sixty percent of Gen Z just proved it.

Here is the number that’s been living rent-free in every Jewish group chat this past week. In the July Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, sixty percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 said they side with Hamas over Israel—the only age group to break that way. It’s the kind of number that makes you set the phone face-down. For about nine seconds. We are who we are.

The Line Nobody Screenshotted

Now scroll one line down. The same poll asked what the terror groups fighting Israel actually want. The top answer among these same young people, at forty-three percent, was “more rights.” Only thirty percent said “destroy Israel.” Older Americans clocked it—among the over-65s, a clear majority said destruction, flat out. And the numbers slide in a straight line with age: the younger the bracket, the likelier it is to file Hamas under civil rights. The confusion isn’t a Gen Z problem. Acting on it is—theirs is the only age group that flipped to Hamas’s side.

So the youngest Americans have gone all-in for a group most of them believe is a civil-rights movement with a good hashtag. That—not the sixty—is the real headline.

Oppressor, Oppressed, Case Closed

You cannot sign up for a cause you’ve been told is the opposite of what it is. These kids didn’t read the Hamas charter and salute. They were sold a bill of goods: a tidy, pre-sorted story in which the world splits into oppressors and oppressed. Israel was filed under “oppressor” years ago, so Hamas, by process of elimination, is the oppressed. And the oppressed in this story are bulletproof: whatever they do is “resistance,” resistance is righteous by definition, and the questions stop there. Nobody in that sixty percent is asking what Hamas wants—the label already answered it. If Israel is the villain, the other guy has to be the hero. That’s the whole logic, and they never get past........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)